Despite political declarations, the economic recovery is not on a sustainable track. We are getting caught in a dangerous deception.

Only a few months after the Wall Street house of cards tumbled in the summer of 2008, many political leaders across the world started issuing declarations that they would “green” the recovery.

The financial crisis was, we were told, a unique opportunity to develop a new economic model, building on the three the pillars of sustainability – social, economic and environmental values. They were ready to abandon risky, short sighted, unsustainable pathways and create robust economies.

Or so it seemed.

The reality is that today, almost three years after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the global economy is in fact growing again – but green growth, with a few notable exceptions, is not happening. On the contrary, the global economy is once again locked onto an unsustainable course.

Reading headlines is deceiving. With the amount of news stories about wind turbines, electric cars and green jobs, one would think that we were at least heading in the right direction. Looking at the key figures, however, tells quite another story.

Global emissions of CO2 reached a record high in 2010 according to the newest data from East Anglia University. The world’s carbon intensity — the amount of CO2 emitted per dollar of GDP – is still way too high. Renewables are essential to sustainable growth, but geothermal, wind and solar account for only 1.7% of global electricity generation in 2009. Fossil fuels still account for 80-90% of global energy.

The numbers can be boring, but we need to look at them. Otherwise, we get caught in a dangerous deception. A cocktail of political rhetoric and mass media coverage easily leaves the impression that there are enough stakeholders out there doing the right thing and we need not worry.

An instructive case study is the amazingly slow proliferation of electric cars. For a number of years, we have heard about electric cars and hybrids. So how many electric cars are actually on the road today? In the US, the world’s biggest car market, the figure is 56,000 electric cars, which is about 0.002% of the US car fleet. If you add hybrids, it amounts to around 1%.

Our children are told about the importance of our forests, especially tropical rain forests, yet deforestation accounts for 20-30% of global CO2 emissions. According to the Global Forest Resources Assessment, we lose 5.2 million hectares of forest annually, the equivalent of an area the size of Costa Rica. The loss is slowing down – but remains critical.

In other words: the economy is growing, but not greening. The calls for a paradigm shift back in 2008 and 2009 seem distant. There are certainly glimpses of hope, and there are positive examples that could bring us closer to a promising trajectory, but as observers of environmental policy over many years, we fear that we are quickly running out of time.

We need to reconsider the way we have chosen to tackle global warming on the international policy level. The vehicle that we have trusted to drive the transformation to date, the multilateral process through the UN, has yet to produce the progress that science tells us is needed.

As value added, it seems obvious to turn to existing success stories and build on them. The global race among industries and countries to be first in delivering smart technologies is probably the most important trend. Korea and the states of California and Colorado are making impressive pushes to lead the green race. Denmark has decoupled energy consumption from economic growth over the last three decades.

World leaders, talking about green growth, must learn from these outstanding examples to accelerate meaningful progress. How can others replicate Colorado – a relatively small state in terms of population with long ties to fossil fuel industries – that is at the moment, a magnet for global green tech companies and investors, especially in renewable energy and smart grids? What can we learn from the all encompassing Korean strategy to create a million green jobs and become the world’s leading supplier of low carbon technologies?

These examples are inspiring to any leader with green ambitions. They are tangible and fact-based, and could be a way, a shortcut even, to close the gap between words and action at the pace needed.

This will be our mission in coming years: to mine these resources which could turn out to be the most precious on the planet. Our hope is to create a template for a wave of technological, political and social innovation, which eventually could secure a global economy that is not just growing, but also greening.

Anthony Giddens is an author and professor at London School of Economics. Alice Madden is the Wirth Chair in Sustainable Development at the University of Colorado. Also contributing to this commentary were Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the European Environment Agency, and Soogil Young, chairman of The Presidential Committee on Green Growth in Korea. The authors are members of The Green Growth Council, an international group of leaders (www.greengrowthleaders.org).

Editor’s note: This is an online-only guest commentary. It has not been edited. Guest commentary submissions of up to 650 words may be sent to columns@denverpost.com.